Remote Medical Diagnosis in Virtual Reality: A Mixed-methods Approach to Understanding the Perceptions of Patients and Physicians

Abstract

Global healthcare faces challenges, including physician shortages and resource limitations. Telehealth has offered solutions through services such as text and video chats. Yet, these methods have their issues: they provide only limited opportunities for diagnoses, and they do not foster solid patient-physician relationships. Virtual reality (VR) offers a promising future alternative, which could facilitate real-time patient-physician interactions that resemble real-life visits through realistic 3D avatars. However, understanding patients’ and physicians’ needs, attitudes, and concerns is crucial for tailoring such VR solutions to healthcare’s unique demands. Therefore, an online patient survey (n = 402) and physician interviews (n = 6) were conducted to understand these needs. Through thematic analysis, common telehealth concerns, including privacy and limited scope of diagnoses in VR, were identified. Unique elevated concerns, mostly around technology reliability, required expertise, accessibility, and integration with existing workflows, also emerged. Furthermore, the study examined the influence of technology affinity on patients’ acceptance of VR telehealth through a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) approach. Overall, this study explores the critical concerns in telehealth and proposes evidence-based considerations for developing VR-based telehealth solutions.